ONC studying risks of de-identified patient records

The Office of the National Coordinator has begun a study on how to overcome the privacy and security risks of using health information that otherwise has been stripped of its personal identifiers such as a patient's name and address.

One danger is that the data might be able to be re-identified through the use of additional records publicly available on the Internet, according to Dr. David Blumenthal, the national health IT coordinator. But health care experts say that the use of de-identified data is critical for tracking population health over time and for research purposes. ONC wants to come to a "consensus on what risk we can tolerate for identification and then what level of removal, what kinds of removal of information, are required to get to that level of risk," Blumenthal told a congressional hearing Sept. 30. But he did not provide further details. Dr Blumenthal and other health IT speakers spoke about the challenges of privacy and security of health information at a hearing of the House Committee on Science and Technology Committee subcommittee on technology and innovation.